Peace & the Media

Measuring Peace in the Media is co-authored with Media Tenor

The Institute for Economics and Peace and Media Tenor collaborate on “Measuring Peace in the Media”, the first study that takes a fact-based approach into understanding the accuracy of international television networks’ coverage of peace, violence and conflict. Two reports have been published to date, the first in October 2010 and the second in January 2012.

The results of the study reveal that a majority of broadcasters do align their media reports with the actual levels of violence in countries they cover. However, many key US broadcasters devote more than 50% of their news and current affairs to topics of violence.

BBC World “The News” led the way when it came to breadth of coverage, regularly reporting on 67 countries across six continents, nearly twice as many countries as the average level of coverage.

The report includes a detailed case study on Afghanistan, which shows that a disproportionate amount of coverage is focused on defence and crime, while neglecting the critical factors needed to build lasting peace. These factors include well-functioning government, a sound business environment and the equitable distribution of resources within the country.

The study analysed 37 TV news and current affairs programmes from 23 networks in 15 countries and then cross-referenced this with the Global Peace Index (GPI). A total of 197,649 reports were analysed in the study, with BBC 2 Newsnight and ZDF Heute Journal found to be the programmes that most aligned with the rankings of the GPI.